Wherever he went he made his mark, striking up strong and lasting friendships with the likes of the great Russian explorer and geographer Petr Petrovich Semenov Tian-Shansky and the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Nonetheless, he was elected to membership of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and spent time in St Petersburg, where he was given a private audience by the Tsar. Journeys to Kuldja, to Issyk Kol and to other remote and unmapped places quickly established his reputation, even though he always remained inorodets – an outsider to the Russian Establishment. His famous mission to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan that began in June 1858 and lasted for more than a year saw him in disguise as a Tashkent merchant, risking his life to gather vital information, not just on current events, but on the ethnic make-up, geography, flora and fauna of this unknown region.
Soon after graduating from Siberian Cadet School at Omsk, he was taking part in reconnaissance missions deep into regions of Central Asia that had seldom been visited by outsiders. Born in 1835 into a wealthy and powerful Kazakh clan, he was one of the first ‘people of the steppe’ to receive a Russian education and military training.
Set against his remarkable output of official reports, articles and research into the history, culture and ethnology of Central Asia, and more importantly, his Kazakh people, it remains an entirely appropriate accolade. When Chokan Valikhanov died of TB in 1865, aged only 29, the Russian Academician Nikolai Veselovsky described his short life as “a meteor flashing across the field of oriental studies”.
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